


To the One I've Sinned Against

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Catholic, Confessions, Kneeling, M/M, Priests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:26:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1777381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>He knelt, touched his fingers to forehead, chest, left shoulder, right, and said more words than the soldier could ever remember speaking together. </em>
</p><p> </p><p>  <em>They came in a well-worn fluent rush, easier than any post-mission report: "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been a long time since my last confession."</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Iulia for patient and recursive beta, and to Rubynye for supporting and cheering and pushing this along all the way!

The soldier stood there a while, looking at the sign and trying to work out why it was important. 

He had been supplying himself with food, getting shelter when he needed it, hiding and protecting himself. Until this moment he had thought that that covered all his needs, but now there was this. It was something that was like and unlike going in after a mission to be cleaned and repaired and put away. Something he could do now, in fact, as it was nearly 3:30 on Saturday, without endangering himself. 

He tried to work out how he knew he wouldn't be in danger, but the risk assessment stayed solid, as impenetrable as it was definite. He needed this, and he could have it, even if he didn't know why.

_Reconciliation_ , the sign said. _Saturday 3:30._

He hesitated still, looking down at himself. He had to be clean, neatly dressed, to go to.... He looked up again at the big building. Yes, of course. It was a church, and churches were safe. A bullet might take a man outside a church, but not inside, nor while he stood silhouetted in the doors--not even an unmarked bullet fired by a man who would never be found.

His clothes were fairly clean, his metal hand safely covered. He had bathed the day before, and he didn't smell badly enough for people to notice at arm's length. He had passed among people earlier today without being noticed. Still, he felt a strange hesitation. The phrase _Sunday best_ drifted uselessly across his mind, attached to the image of clothing he had never worn--had not worn in a long time. His shoes, he thought, should be shiny. 

He glanced at the sign again, fixing on the word _Saturday_. It was all right not to be in his Sunday best on a Saturday; something about this reasoning fit into a well-traveled groove somewhere in his head. He felt suddenly, fiercely certain that it was all right to wear one's working clothes on a Saturday, even into church, no matter what anyone might say.

Spurred by the forcefulness of that thought, he broke cover and strode quickly across the open ground to the church doors. The interior was dim, but it smelled right, like _church_ , like _safety_. It smelled familiar, but he knew he had never been here before. Still, he knew this place. _Sanctuary_.

He felt the same sense of returning-to-base that he thought he had felt at the ends of missions, coming in to for maintenance and repair. That meant pain, and forgetting, but it was the order of things: complete the mission, and then return to base.

This might mean the same thing. Perhaps that was what was required to be reconciled. But he kept breathing in the slightly dusty smell of waxed wood and the faint tang of incense burned long ago and smoke from snuffed candles, and he found that his body was not bracing for pain. His body, in fact, was soothed, tension ebbing from his muscles as they would when ongoing pain ceased.

He went further inside, through another door, and found himself standing at the back of the big open space of the church, under a vaulted ceiling of dark wood. Only a few lights were lit, and one was off to his right, showing the dark wooden structure of the confessional.

That was what reconciliation meant. He was here to confess, to do penance, and to be absolved of his sins. What he had done wrong could be made right. There was a procedure. He felt a rush of relief and gladness. There was a procedure. He didn't have to wander alone anymore, not knowing what to do next. He could hand himself over now.

He approached hesitantly and saw that the penitent's door of the confessional was open, a signal he recognized. He stepped into the darkness of the little box and pulled the door shut behind him. The next movements were as automatic as handling a weapon in the midst of a fight. He knelt before the screened window into the other side of the confessional, touched his fingers to forehead, chest, left shoulder, right, and said more words than the soldier could ever remember speaking together. 

They came in a well-worn fluent rush, easier than any post-mission report: "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been a long time since my last confession."

There was a brief pause, and then a male voice--adult but younger than he had somehow expected a priest to be--said, "That's all right. You've come now. Is there something in particular troubling you, to bring you to confession today?"

The soldier marveled, even as he spoke, at the way he didn't hesitate to report, the way he knew that he could and must speak freely here. "I had a mission, Father. I could have completed it, but I didn't. I could have. I didn't--want to. I _chose_ not to. I let him get away. I let him ruin everything, and then I saved him instead of letting him die. I went out of my way to save him."

The pause from the priest was longer this time, but he finally said, "You are confessing to _not_ killing a man? Saving his life?"

Only when the question was asked did he realize that that was backward. It was what he would have reported--confessed--if he'd been taken in like normal after a mission. This was different, though. He ought to be confessing other things; he thought he remembered confessing killing men, a long time ago--not in a box like this, but somewhere drafty and cold. 

He had killed men; he had killed people of all kinds. There was a kaleidoscope of them in his mind, from his mission, from--somewhere else, some other mission, or many missions. He couldn't make the details come clear. But the priest had asked what brought him today, and all those other missions were over, done, reported and reconciled. 

He was here today about the last mission, the one left undone. The one he had willfully failed. The one that had left him out here alone. "He was my mission. I'm confessing that I didn't complete my mission. I disobeyed orders."

The pause was not quite as long this time. The priest's voice showed some signs of strain. "Tell me about these orders. Who gave them to you?"

"My... commander," the soldier said hesitantly. He could remember the man's face, his voice, but details blurred when he tried to focus on them. He did not know the man's name or rank. "He said--it was very important. For the world. Shaping--the century. He said I had to. No one else would be able to stop him, but I could."

"Son," the priest said. "Was this that battle in Washington a few weeks ago? SHIELD, and the helicarriers?"

The soldier sighed relief at being understood, and let his forehead rest against the screen. "Yes, Father."

"In the midst of all that, someone ordered you to kill a man?"

"Yes, Father," the soldier repeated. Since the priest already knew the rest of it, he explained, "I was supposed to kill Captain America."

The priest let out a shaky breath. "And you didn't do it."

"I didn't," the soldier affirmed, because he knew that sometimes saying just _yes_ or _no_ was the wrong answer. "And I can't--I can't go back, now. I don't--I _won't let them_ give me another mission. I won't kill him. But I don't know what to do now. I was disobedient. I need to be reconciled."

"Well," the priest said. "It doesn't sound like you repent of your disobedience, does it?"

The soldier flinched, but told the truth. "No, Father."

"It also doesn't sound to me like your disobedience was a sin," the priest added. "I can't offer you absolution for doing the right thing, son, even if it's landed you in a hell of a mess. If you need some other kind of help--"

"No," the soldier said, because this wasn't going right, this wasn't the _procedure_. He pushed out of the small dark box and strode quickly out of the church, ignoring the priest calling after him--

But one hesitation was programmed into him more deeply than his need to escape. The soldier stopped when he stepped into the central aisle, dropped to his right knee, and made the sign again, touching forehead, chest, left shoulder, right. The priest's door started to open as he straightened up, and the soldier turned and strode out quickly, not breaking into a run but not taking any chance of being caught, either.

* * *

**1944**

One thing Bucky still hadn't gotten used to about serving under Captain America was the way Steve acted like the best kind of officer, making sure his men were tended to before he accepted anything for himself. Everyone ate before Steve did, everyone bedded down before Steve would take a load off, and when they were in camp at the right time, every Catholic commando went to confession before Steve would take his turn with the chaplain. 

That made sense to Bucky--of course Steve was a good officer--except for the fact that Steve included Bucky in the category of _everyone_. Steve always went first when he and Bucky went to confession. Steve always wound up with a longer penance even when he and Bucky confessed to doing all the same things; that was what you got when you confessed to every single solitary sin of pride and wrath and envy on top of what you actually did. Steve went first, to get a head start on his penance, and that way he and Bucky finished together.

Bucky was one of Cap's men now, though, so when Dum Dum came back and knelt down a little way from the fire to do his penance, Bucky got up and went to take his turn. He felt Steve's eyes on him every step of the way, but he didn't look back. 

The door of the chaplain's tent--Bucky couldn't remember his name, but it didn't matter as long as he was a Catholic priest who spoke English--was tied open, signaling that no one else was inside. Bucky tugged the tie free, letting the canvas fall shut as he stepped in. It was cold in the tent, and the wind rattled the sides when it gusted, but this was still better than being in some ancient stone church with a local priest who only spoke French and Latin. 

Bucky walked over to the little curtain rigged up from a bedsheet that was serving as a confessional. There was a folded blanket on this side. Bucky knelt down on it, dipped his fingers into the tin cup that stood for a font, and crossed himself. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been two big missions and three road skirmishes since my last confession."

"I understand, son," the priest said, and Bucky detected New Jersey in his voice--Italian, probably. He felt a weird, distant twinge of homesickness for Brooklyn and St. Mike's and Father Cooley, who'd heard his and Steve's confessions for nearly twenty years before they came over here.

The chaplain was here now, though, and it was time to confess. Bucky had been tallying it up while he sat by the fire, waiting for Dum Dum to finish his turn, so he had it all straight. He couldn't give a priest the shaved numbers he told the guys. He had to confess the true ones, including the spooky shots that he couldn't explain how he'd been able to make, firing even before he'd seen movement. 

The spookiness itself curled darkly in his chest like a sin all its own, heavier than any commandment Bucky had ever broken, but Bucky stuck to the facts.

"I've killed nineteen men since my last confession, Father," Bucky reported, and to save the catechizing he recited, "enemy soldiers, in combat, under orders, to protect my men." To protect Steve, nearly every time, but Steve protected all of them, so it worked out to the same thing.

The priest made a faint noise like amusement or impatience--probably didn't like Bucky jumping ahead. "Did you enjoy killing those men?"

Bucky frowned down at his own hands. He couldn't remember the last time he'd enjoyed anything, not like what that word used to mean back home, or on his first leave or two. "I was glad they were dead and my men weren't. Killing doesn't make me happy."

"Do you regret the necessity of it?"

Bucky made his own little noise of amusement under his breath. "Do I regret being here? Yes, sir. I regret all of this."

"Drafted, were you?" the priest said, seeming to understand.

_Yes_ , Bucky wanted to say, but you couldn't lie to a priest in the confessional, even one as makeshift as this. "To begin with. I volunteered for this part."

"Mm." The priest didn't tell him it was his own fault then, which Father Cooley probably would have, shaking his head at Bucky for following Steve into trouble again. "Well, I'm sure you've been told before, it's not a mortal sin for a soldier to kill in battle. Anything else you want to confess? Fornication?"

Bucky bowed his head and let his shoulders shake. Didn't he _wish_ , but there had hardly been time in the last month, and--he thought of Steve, the way he looked at that picture of Peggy tucked into his compass so that Bucky couldn't even feel jealous. Good for Steve, that was what that was. 

Even if there had been time, or anyone who gave him a second look, Bucky didn't think he could bear to be touched. He couldn't let anyone close enough to him to know--

"No, Father," Bucky said. "Didn't get a chance. Impure thoughts, sometimes. And taking the Lord's name in vain, although I still say some of those were prayers. And I stole a cigarette off Jim," he added, remembering. He felt genuinely bad about that one, even though Jim had had it to steal because Bucky usually gave his ration away to whichever of the others was nearby when he opened it. Jim had been thinking he'd have that one to smoke and Bucky had taken it. The fact that Jim had promptly caught him when he lit up and smoked half of it with him was beside the point.

"Stealing from your own brother in arms," the priest said, gently scolding. "Now that is something to repent of."

"Yes, Father." Bucky ducked his head. "I do repent of that."

"And what else?" the priest said. "Something's troubling you, son, I can hear it in your voice. You could die any day. Don't go to your grave without speaking of what's really troubling you, and don't waste time confessing to things you don't care about. God's time is infinite, but mine isn't, and neither is yours."

Bucky tried to think of something else to confess, but that was just stalling. He knew better than to lie. And maybe--maybe it was some kind of sin the priest could put a name to. Maybe Bucky could confess and be rid of it somehow.

"I said I didn't enjoy killing anyone," Bucky said quietly. "And it's true, Father, I swear, but--I'm so good at it. Better than I used to be. I was captured, and they, they did things to me, I don't even know what. But I've been different ever since. There's something in me, something--something wrong. They _changed_ me."

Even as he said it, Bucky realized he was wrong; he couldn't be absolved of the darkness, because he couldn't repent it. Steve would have been dead six times over since Bucky's last confession if he were only as good a sniper as he'd been with the 107th. Whatever this thing inside him was, whatever they'd made him into, he couldn't regret it and he sure as hell wouldn't ask God to take it from him.

"Ah, son," the priest sighed. "War leaves scars on every man. But you must hold fast to your faith in the Lord, and not give in to the sin of despair. You must remember that you will be redeemed from every sin. Do you believe that?"

"Yes, Father," Bucky said obediently, because you didn't tell a priest you _didn't_ believe, no matter how improbable it seemed. But Steve showing up a foot taller and a hundred and fifty pounds heavier to rescue him from those Hydra bastards had seemed pretty improbable, so maybe it was true that God's mysterious ways could spare some mercy for whatever Bucky was these days. 

"Is there anything else, then?" The priest was softened a little from his brusqueness, but he still had plenty of other confessions to hear tonight, and Steve was waiting his turn.

"All my other sins I have forgotten to name," Bucky recited. He rattled through the Act of Contrition without being prompted, not letting himself think too much about the pains of hell and loss of heaven as the words poured out of his mouth. 

The priest said his part, assigning Bucky a couple of rosaries to say, one for the souls of the men he'd killed and one for his own, but the _absolvo te_ didn't budge the darkness in Bucky. It only turned him loose.

He walked back to their camp with his hands in his pockets, and Steve waited until Bucky had gone and knelt down by Dum Dum before he got up and went to take his own turn. Dum Dum crossed himself and handed his rosary over to Bucky without a word, and Bucky took it. It dangled loosely from his hands and the beads made a lonely sound clacking against each other as they swung, but Bucky ignored that and pressed his thumb against the crucifix as he started his prayers. 

His own voice mumbling the Creed under his breath wasn't enough to keep his mind on what he was supposed to be doing penance for, though. He whispered out his _I believe_ , but all he could think was _It didn't work. I'm still not ready to die._

But they had a mission to get to tomorrow, so Bucky got on with saying his prayers.


	2. Chapter 2

Now that he had the idea of reconciliation in his head, the failure of his first attempt at confession (not, by a long shot, his _first confession_ , which was something special that still wouldn't come clear in his head) nagged at him. There were no confessions on Sundays--and he had no Sunday best to wear into a church--but he located another church to try on Monday morning. He slipped in as a trickle of elderly worshipers left at the end of the early Mass. 

There was a light on at the confessional. This one was a more modern-looking structure of light wood with fabric screens, but the function was apparent. No one else was waiting to confess. The soldier reached over without thinking and dipped his fingers into a dish of water--holy water--he remembered being called _Mr. Barnes_ in a stern voice for splashing it--but his fingers rose neatly from the font, barely dampened. He crossed himself before he skirted around the edge of the church to the confessional.

He knelt, crossed himself again, and said, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been a long time since my last confession."

The last one could hardly count, after all. 

"You're welcome here, son," the priest said. "Go ahead when you're ready."

He'd been thinking about this, after last time. He couldn't confess to something that wasn't a sin, the priest had said, and he wasn't trying to be reconciled with Hydra, so confessing to the way he'd failed them wasn't the point. He had to confess to the way he'd done wrong to the rest of the world, the one he was only now moving around in of his own will. He was learning that he had had a hand in shaping this world, but not for the better. 

"I killed people," the soldier said quietly. "I killed--a lot of people. I'm not sure how many, but I think--I think it was wrong. I think some of them weren't what I thought they were. Maybe none of them."

"What did you think they were?" the priest asked. He sounded like he was being careful with his words, and the soldier made himself _not_ analyze the priest like a target. The priest was supposed to be making a decision about him, not the other way around.

"My missions," he said first, and then, because they _had_ all been his missions and that wasn't what he'd been wrong about, "I thought they were dangerous. They told me--these people had to be killed, to keep the world safe. They told me it was necessary. I was a soldier. They said I was a soldier."

"Ahh." The priest seemed to relax a little. "And these--missions of yours, these were not on the battlefield? The people you were told to kill were not soldiers?"

"No," the soldier said, but he remembered Captain America, the men he'd gone through to get at him that last day. "Not all of them," he amended. "And I think they--sometimes when they were soldiers, they were the wrong soldiers. I should have been on their side."

"Oh, son," the priest said gently. "That's a hard thing to come to terms with. I'm glad you came to confession today."

The soldier nodded silently, though it was still harder for him to remember what he'd done than to accept it. Even now, knowing better, his memories of the missions he'd carried out felt cool and remote, the way he'd felt when he did them. They didn't trouble him so much as the knowledge that he _ought_ to be troubled by them.

"You said that you think, now, that they were not what you thought then," the priest went on. "At the time you killed them, did you believe in your heart that they were dangerous to you or to other people? Did you believe what you were doing was right?"

The soldier frowned, searching his memories. "I didn't think about it," he said slowly. "They told me who to kill. They said sometimes why it was important, but that didn't really matter. I didn't think about whether it was wrong or right, it was just--my mission. I knew I had to complete my mission, that was all. They--they made me forget things. I didn't remember about confession until a couple of days ago."

The priest was silent for several seconds this time. His voice was back to being very cautious when he said, "They made you forget things?"

"They had a... machine," the soldier explained. "I don't know what it did, just that it hurt. I still can't remember everything, but things are coming back to me the longer I go without being prepped again."

The priest wasn't silent this time, though he didn't speak to the soldier right away; there was a low, fierce stream of words from his side of the screen, praying or cursing. This didn't seem like part of the procedure. The soldier waited for the priest to return to the normal script, which he did a moment later.

"I think I'm starting to understand," the priest said gently. "Tell me, when you killed these people, were you ever aware that you had a choice in the matter, whether or not to kill them?"

The soldier frowned. "I don't think so. No. Sometimes I could choose how to do it, when to do it. But I never thought about not doing it. It was my mission."

"Did you fear punishment, if you didn't do what you were told?"

The soldier shook his head. "They wouldn't punish me. There wasn't any point. They would just prep me again and send me back out to do it right."

The priest exhaled a ragged sigh. "To kill is a sin, as you know, and I believe that you sincerely repent of what you have done. But for a sin to be truly serious--mortal, we used to say--there must be three elements present. The action must be wrong, which, I agree, it was."

The soldier frowned. He didn't remember this part of the procedure. 

"A sin must also be freely chosen," the priest went on. "This is why it's not a sin to kill in self-defense, or for a soldier to do so in battle. Sometimes there is no choice. You have said that you were not aware of having a choice when you killed to complete your missions, because you were controlled by these people who took your memories. Is that true? Do you stand by that, before God?"

"I didn't know I could choose," the soldier said reluctantly, feeling the chance of absolution slipping from him again. The priest had said it was a sin, though. He hadn't said he wouldn't grant absolution. "But--the last time I did choose. I chose not to. So I could have chosen all along."

"Mm," the priest said. "Maybe, although you didn't know. Which brings us to the last point. In order for a sin to be truly serious, it must violate your conscience. You must know that what you are doing is wrong and choose to do it anyway. You know that now, and you have come to confession because of that, but did you know at the time? When you killed these people, were you aware of doing something that was wrong?"

The answer to that was obvious. He remembered the cold, calm satisfaction of it. He remembered the certainty of doing right, the comfort of simple obedience. 

"No," the soldier said. "I didn't know."

"I can't begin to imagine what it's like to realize how much wrong you've done unknowingly," the priest said, his voice still soft and gentle. "But do you understand, also, how much wrong has been done against you?"

The soldier closed his fists, remembering the picture at the museum, the smiling man in the video. _Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._ The memory-not-memory came to him again of the way it had hurt, which he could only recall in the sudden cessation of pain, the echo of it through his body, because the moment itself was wiped clear away. 

"I understand," he said quietly. "But I, I--" the words came to him from some other time, a dark close box and a different voice on the other side of the screen. "I'm only responsible for my own conscience. My own soul."

"That," the priest sighed. "Is very true. We'll get to that, then. Do you wish to make an act of contrition?"

The soldier nodded, and the words came as automatically as kneeling and crossing himself. 

When he finished, the priest said, "Pray for the souls of all those you killed. Light a candle or say a prayer for each one you can remember, and for those you may not remember. That is your penance."

The soldier exhaled, nodding, and kept his head bowed through his absolution. He slipped out of the confessional and went to kneel in the last pew to start counting off prayers on his fingers, trying to hold each face in his mind through a muttered Hail Mary. His thoughts drifted, though, to the knowledge that this wasn't enough. It hadn't _changed_ anything. The memories were still there, and he had still done what he'd done. He was still the soldier; he still wasn't reconciled.

He was aware of the priest leaving the confessional; he left the church while the soldier was midway through his twelfth Hail Mary, and returned when he'd just begun counting off prayers for the flight crew he'd wiped out on the helicarrier because he had to stop Captain America, and they would have made it harder. The priest genuflected in the center aisle and walked all the way to the last pew, where the soldier knelt. The priest set something down before he walked away again, carefully staying in the soldier's sightline the whole time.

The soldier kept his head bowed, muttering through his prayers. It felt like stopping early when he didn't count a prayer for Captain America on his fingers, but that was the one target he hadn't killed. His penance was done.

He crossed himself and rose from his knees to walk to the end of the pew. A paper grocery bag awaited him there, full of folded clean clothes and food that could be eaten without cooking, and on top a spill of brightly-colored brochures and flyers, plus a post-it note. It gave a phone number and said, _Call anytime._

The soldier lifted the brochures--for soldiers, for trauma, for homeless people--and set them down in the pew beside a hymnal. The post-it note he folded and put into his pocket rather than leave it for someone else to find. He already knew he wasn't going to call. Talking wouldn't help, not like that. He needed to be reconciled. He just had to find the right way to confess, the absolution that would matter. 

He took the bag of supplies, though. He wasn't going to say no to food.

* * *

**1942**

Bucky gave up on sleeping shortly after dawn on the morning he shipped out. He thought about going by Steve's to try to talk a little more sense to him, but he knew that they'd left it as well as they could last night. Whatever answer Steve had gotten at the enlistment center, Bucky didn't want to hear about it this morning. He didn't want to give them another chance to fight.

He put on his uniform again and walked down to St. Mike's instead. There was more than an hour yet before eight o'clock Mass, but Bucky had been an altar boy long enough to know you could show up at the rectory around this time and cadge breakfast off the housekeeper. Father Cooley would be working already, tending to one sorry soul or another.

Sure enough, Mrs. Mulroney let Bucky into the kitchen. When Bucky declined a cup of coffee--if he hadn't been in uniform he could swear she'd still have offered him a glass of milk--she gave him a sharp look and said, "I'll go get Father, you wait here."

Bucky nodded and stayed put, studying the list tacked up by the door of the altar boys for all the week's Masses. It didn't seem like so long ago that he would have been checking the list to see where J. Barnes and S. Rogers appeared--always together except a week here or there when they were being punished for some prank. His biggest concern then would have been who was listed first and therefore got to ring the bells at the consecration.

Father Cooley tapped his shoulder and Bucky turned, surprised as always to find himself the same height as the priest. Father was the same ageless _old_ he'd been since Bucky was a kid, broad-shouldered in his black shirt and pants with the white rectangle of the clerical collar at his throat. He swept a thoughtful look over Bucky's uniform and then said, "Would you like to go over to the church?"

Bucky nodded jerkily. "Please."

He knew people--adults--could say their confessions anywhere, but he couldn't imagine spilling his guts without the confessional's screen between him and Father. 

Father nodded and settled his hand on Bucky's shoulder, steering him out the door onto the back porch. He let go as they walked over to the church, saying conversationally, "Shipping out today? And a sergeant, I see?"

"Yes sir," Bucky said. "I've got about an hour."

"Well, hopefully this won't take that long," Father said, giving him a knowing sideways look. 

Bucky looked away. He'd have shoved his hands in his pockets if he didn't suspect that Father would shout at him for it in exactly the same way his drill sergeants had. He took a couple of quick strides ahead to open the side door into the church, holding it until Father came up behind him and caught it.

He dipped his fingers in the little side font automatically, crossing himself as he crossed the threshold. The church was dim inside, only the sanctuary light glowing red, and quiet in the really thorough way a church was when it was empty--it always seemed hushed, but now it was a big, empty, _silent_ space. It had stopped seeming spooky by about Bucky's third week as an altar boy, though, so he slipped down the side aisle to the confessional and then hesitated outside, waiting for Father to go in first. 

The little electric light above the priest's door switched on, pointedly illuminating _Fr. Cooley_. Bucky smiled sheepishly and opened the penitent's door, stepping into the little booth of the confessional and kneeling down even as he closed the door behind him.

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been four days since my last confession."

Father didn't say anything. He didn't have to. Bucky could fill in Father's opinion of how much sin he'd already managed to pack into four days to merit coming to confession again.

"I didn't get in much trouble before I got my orders," Bucky said. Normally he would have just rattled things off, and gotten it over with, but this wasn't the confession he used to make every Saturday. It wasn't the one Father was expecting him to make. "Last night I fixed up a double date for me and Steve and I wound up going home with both of 'em. So, uh, fornication, twice. At the same time."

The silence from the other side of the screen made Bucky's shoulders bow. Confessing to what he'd been thinking was usually Steve's line, but Bucky knew what he actually had to admit right now. 

"I didn't care about either of them. I didn't even want them that bad, Father, I was just--Steve took off in the middle of the date. We were down at the Fair and he just dropped us and went off to that enlistment center they've got set up to try _again_."

Father sighed.

"I fought with Steve," Bucky admitted. "Or at least--I told him not to be an idiot. I told him to stop trying to get himself killed. They made _me_ a sergeant, sooner or later they're going to take him, and then what?"

"James," Father said, sounding tired. 

Bucky was guiltily aware that he'd dragged Father out early for this. At least for most of the last nineteen years Father only had to listen to him and Steve going on about each other on Saturday afternoons. Still, he couldn't have left without properly squaring things with somebody, and if he couldn't with Steve it would have to be God and Father Cooley.

"Did you and Steven part friends?" Father asked.

It was hardly the first time he'd heard what Bucky was thinking in the confessional. Bucky nodded, remembering that last hug, the feel of Steve's bony body pressed against his one more time, the look on Steve's face when Bucky turned back to salute.

"Yeah," Bucky said. "I think so, at least. But he wouldn't give up."

"Steven's choices are his own," Father said, and that wasn't the first time Bucky had heard that one. Nobody knew how stubborn Steve was better than Bucky did. "You must commend him to God, and look to your own soul. You are going to war. You must be prepared; death could come any day over there."

It wasn't like death couldn't come any day _here_ , especially not for Steve, but Bucky said an obedient, "Yes, Father."

Father snorted. "And to use two young ladies in that fashion, James, there is really no excuse for that."

Bucky ducked his head lower, even as he remembered the way the evening had ended. The girls hadn't seemed to mind, but he knew that wasn't the point. "No, Father. I know. I'm sorry."

"God has chosen to separate you from Steven for a time, James," Father said firmly. "You must accept that. You must see that this is His plan for you both. Things will be different when you come home."

Bucky shivered at the thought. He didn't want to come back and find things different, find _Steve_ different, or just--gone. He'd never wanted things to change, but the war had caught up with him and changed things already. He couldn't stop it if it wanted to catch up with Steve. "I don't want to go, Father."

That was by way of being a confession all on its own, but one he'd confessed half a dozen times already.

"That, too, you must accept as God's will, James," Father said softly. "Know that loving hearts will be praying for your safety every day, and do your duty with a good will in the meantime."

"Yes, Father," Bucky repeated. It wasn't much comfort, but he didn't think anything would be, except someone shouting in the street outside that the war was over, and Father telling Bucky to go and ring the church bells, and--

"Will you say your act of contrition, or is there more?" Father asked.

"All my other sins I have forgotten to name," Bucky recited, because nothing else mattered as much as last night and Steve. He launched into the Act of Contrition, trying not to think about how much his life was about to get amended whether he liked it or not. 

Father assigned him an entire rosary--not because of the girls, Bucky knew by ranking this against other penances, but because he'd done it to spite Steve. Bucky crossed himself again after his absolution, thanked Father, and slipped out to kneel in the pew he and Steve usually claimed for their penances, at the outside end. He heard the electric light on the confessional click off, and Father came up the aisle behind him and stopped. 

Bucky kept his head bowed, even though he was still on the Creed and it wouldn't matter if he lost his place and had to start over. Father didn't say anything, only set his hand lightly on Bucky's head, like he was a little kid, and signed a cross on his forehead with his thumb. 

Bucky shivered under the touch but kept praying, and Father walked out of the church, back to his breakfast and the next sad sack who would try to take him away from it.

Bucky went on counting prayers on his fingers, but he knew he was doing a bad job even if he did rattle off every last one in order. Every prayer he said was really, _Steve, don't go_ , and he already knew it wouldn't do any good. Bucky was the one leaving.


	3. Chapter 3

His name was James Buchanan Barnes, or at least it had been, once. Barnes was, or had been, Catholic: the impulse to repent, that was Barnes. If he thought of it now as a desire to return to base and be repaired, that was the Winter Soldier intervening. That was what Hydra had made Barnes into, over the decades they'd had him. That was what they'd done to him, among much else.

_"Do you understand how much wrong has been done against you?"_

He did understand--better every day, as things came clearer in his mind--but he was also more and more sure that it was true that he was responsible for his own soul. If he wanted to be reconciled, he had to find the right confession to make. Neither his last mission nor all the missions before had done the trick, but he wasn't that man anymore.

Barnes hadn't been really responsible for any of that. Barnes had to confess to his own sins now, and if they were petty and pointless, well, what was Barnes anymore? Just a broken soldier killing time, waiting for another mission to come through.

He slipped into another church after early Mass on Wednesday; he had guessed from its architecture that it would have old-fashioned confessionals, and it did. There were even other penitents ahead of him, an elderly woman slipping into the box as he watched, a few others already kneeling. Barnes sat in the last pew and waited his turn, letting his eyes roam over the stained glass windows and the gilt details on the ceiling. Barnes's memories of other churches--one church in particular, to which all other churches were compared--sifted through his mind. 

He had confessed to things on this scale before. He had had the kind of life that had no great sins in it, only ordinary faults and failures. He had been human once--not a weapon, not even a soldier. If that was what he wanted to go back to, this was only one of a thousand steps along the way, but it wasn't such a hard step to take, he thought.

The old woman came out of the confessional, noted his presence with interest, and then crossed herself and knelt at the end of the pew with some effort. Barnes slipped out by the center aisle, genuflecting along the way, and went to the confessional.

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," he recited, crossing himself. "It has been two days since my last confession."

"I see," the priest said. He sounded young, and maybe a little unnerved at the idea that Barnes had done so much sinning in two days that he needed to come to midweek confession. "Go ahead when you're ready."

"There were some things I forgot the last time I came to confession," Barnes explained. "I have stolen things several times in the last few weeks--medical supplies, clothing, food. I could have gotten them in other ways, but it was faster and easier to steal, so I did. I know that it was wrong."

"Ah," the priest said, sounding a little relieved. "Well--you are correct, theft is certainly a serious sin. But it sounds as if there was some necessity behind your thefts?"

"Some," Barnes admitted, but he repeated stubbornly, "I could've found some other way, though. It would've taken longer, but it was my choice. I made a choice."

He wasn't sure, especially at first, that he'd exactly known it was wrong. He'd only really thought about what was efficient and what he could get away with. But it had been his own choice--not programmed, not a mission.

"Well," the priest said. "Far be it from me to deny you your conscience. If you are able to make some reparation for what you have done, now or in the future when you are not in such dire straits, you should do so. And from now on, you must find honest means to supply your needs. I can give you some information about shelters, and--"

"Thank you, Father," Barnes cut in, and felt a sharp sting of guilt for his rudeness--to a priest, and in the confessional, no less. He expected a sharp retort, but the priest said nothing for long enough that Barnes added, "I know now. I can manage."

"Still, remember that it is a kindness in you to allow others to help. That is also a way you can atone for what you've done before now."

Barnes frowned down at his folded hands--one gloved, one bare--as he considered that. It wasn't quite an assignment of penance, but it niggled at something in his head.

"Is there anything else?" the priest asked. "It's all right if you want to think a little while, to be sure you haven't missed anything."

Barnes didn't really need to think about it, though. He'd had enough time beforehand to think it through, and his old memories carried a kind of checklist of sins that might need confessing.

"I've lied to people," he said. "About who I am and what I've been doing. And sometimes I lie about stupid things, just because I think I know what they're expecting to hear and I don't want them to know the truth about me. I told someone I was a White Sox fan the other day."

"The White Sox," the priest repeated, sounding a little appalled.

Barnes ducked his head, his lips tense and up-turned with something like a smile. "I know, Father, I sinned against God _and_ the Dodgers, and I'm sorry for that."

The priest let out a little sound that might have been a laugh choked back, and Barnes felt something snap into place--a different kind of reconciliation than the absolution. That was the knowledge that he'd made the priest laugh with his confession for the first time in a very long time, though he used to pride himself on managing it somehow or other as many weeks as not. Barnes had always tried to do that.

When the priest spoke again his voice was serious, and Barnes made himself pay attention to the main point. "As with stealing, lying is a serious sin," the priest said. "But again, if you are forced to lie to protect yourself--of course it is better to tell the truth, or to find some way to decline to answer without lying, but you are allowed to protect yourself. You must just try to get yourself to a place where it's safe to tell the truth, and try to make amends when you can."

Barnes nodded slowly, though he didn't know what kind of place that could be, when he'd betrayed Hydra and killed so many people. There weren't any places he knew of safer than _nowhere_ , except inside a church. And of course he wouldn't lie in a church, or in a confessional.

"There's another thing." This felt most familiar of all Barnes's confessions, even though the act had only occurred to him a couple of nights ago, waking out of a dream with his hand already halfway into his pants. It had been nearly irresistible to finish, and to try it again just before dawn, and again the following night and every time he'd had sufficient privacy since. There was a voice in his head, half-laughing but not joking at all, saying, _You know anything that feels that good has to be a sin._

"I've been jerking off," he explained. "Twice a day. Or--maybe three times."

The priest didn't make a sound this time, but there was a pause where maybe he was working hard at not making a sound. Barnes felt faintly pleased with himself again. 

"Is that... troubling you?" the priest asked.

Barnes frowned, playing those words over again in his head. _Anything that feels that good has to be a sin._ He knew that. He knew it was; he knew he had to confess to it. He wasn't supposed to spend time on indulging himself like that.

"I know it's wrong," Barnes said finally.

"Well," the priest said. "There are worse things. Do you look at anything when you do? Pornography?"

A whole string of images sleeted through Barnes's brain: tattered eight-pagers and pinups and slipping into a seedy theater to spend a nickel on a blue picture.

"No," he said. "Not--not anymore. But I kind of see in my head sometimes--" and he realized just before the words were on his tongue that this was its own confession, its own special weight of wrongness to be made right, but he didn't let himself cringe from it. "I think about a man."

"Ah," the priest said softly. "I see. A particular man?"

Barnes nodded slowly, because he knew that blond hair, those eyes, that smile, always that _smile_ , even though the body he imagined under his hands or grinding up against him was different, sometimes skinny and small, sometimes muscular and big enough to hold him down. Sometimes he was the strongest man the soldier had ever fought against.

"Yes, Father," he said. The next words came in a well-worn stream, as automatic and as undeniably true as the act of contrition or the Sign of the Cross. "I can't help it, I love him. I can't stop loving him."

The priest sighed softly, and he said, "Well, you know as well as I do what the Church says about that. But love--not lust, but real love--is the greatest virtue there is. If it's real love that draws you to this man, there's no sin in loving him. And if the best you can do to be chaste is to keep matters in your own hands instead of going to him, then you're doing the right thing."

Barnes felt like he was floating, unmoored, drifting down a river; they were entirely off the script now. He was supposed to be scolded, admonished to do better, to put these feelings aside. The priest wasn't supposed to tell him it was all right, wasn't supposed to hold out _going to him_ as if that, of all things, were an option. 

The priest was still talking, saying more impossible things about _acceptance_ and being faithful, but Barnes barely heard a word of it until the priest gently prompted him for other sins, and he could parrot out the usual lines about the sins he'd forgotten to mention and go into the act of contrition.

The priest assigned him a mere double-handful of prayers, not even an entire rosary, and after the absolution Barnes slipped out to take his place in the last pew, counting out Hail Marys on his fingers. He kept losing his place when his thoughts went back to the words he'd said without having to think. _I can't help it, I love him. I can't stop loving him._

He hadn't known that before now, not those words, and yet he thought he'd always known it. He thought it was the first thing he'd ever known.

_I knew him._

* * *

**1939**

Bucky had to tell half a dozen people why he was at confession without Steve before he actually got his turn with Father Cooley, which just made it worse. He had to smile and assure people that Steve would be fine next week. He had to act like this was just a Saturday afternoon like any other and he had nothing special to confess, again and again until he could finally step into the dim refuge of the confessional. 

He didn't even speak right away. He just crossed himself and let his shoulders slump, his forehead resting on his folded hands, until Father said, "Confession must be spoken aloud, you know."

Bucky strangled a crazed laugh and picked his head up enough to say, "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been a week since my last confession."

"Ah, James," Father said. "Have you misplaced Steven, or did the two of you trade places this week?"

Bucky closed his eyes tight. "He's sick in bed, Father. Not--not real bad, you don't gotta come see him, but he can't get up and down stairs without coughing like he's gonna bust a lung. I got him to agree that he can't come to Mass tomorrow and he better stay put today, too."

"James," Father sighed, but with a very different emphasis. This was the first time Steve had gotten seriously sick since it was just the two of them--Steve's ma had been gone years now, but after the past winter they didn't even have Bucky's folks to fall back on at a time like this. There was no one but Bucky left to look after Steve, and for all that he wasn't even sick enough to be worth paying a doctor, Bucky was managing to make a hell of a mess of it.

"Steve started feeling poorly on Monday, so we didn't--anyway, Steve wouldn't have anything to confess if he had come, and I don't--I don't have to confess anything about Steve."

"You and Steven are still not actually able to confess and be absolved in each other's places," Father said patiently, and not nearly for the first time. "Stick to your own confession, James."

Bucky took a breath, bracing himself. "The thing is I--it's not like I meant to step out on him, Father. That wasn't it."

He ground to a halt there, and after a while Father said in a slightly ominous tone, "I'm listening."

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his mouth down against his knuckles--his lips still felt a little bruised when he did that. 

"I went down by the docks last night," Bucky said softly. "There were three guys. I sucked each of 'em off in an alley down there. One at a time, I mean. For money. I had to get enough to get Steve's codeine syrup, he was coughing so bad all week neither of us could sleep. He was getting all ragged around the edges, Father, like he was fading right away in front of me just from that coughing. I had to do something."

Father sighed.

"I didn't--I didn't let them do anything for me, I didn't do it for pleasure, just--it was the most honest way I could think of to come up with the money. And you can't tell me I'm leading sailors into a life of sin because if it hadn't been me, it would have been the next guy they met."

"Well," Father said, exasperated, "it's a wonder you're bothering to confess at all, then."

Bucky winced. "I lied to Steve, though. I haven't told him what I did or where I got the money for the medicine. He thinks I stole it and he's hardly speaking to me, but I can't tell him what I did, Father, he'll hate it."

 _He'll hate me_ , Bucky thought, but he knew it was worse than that. Steve would forgive Bucky for being too dumb to work out another way to get the medicine and too much a coward to let Steve try to tough it out like he said he could. Steve would probably even forgive him for sucking off three sailors in a single night, but he'd _know_. He'd know and he'd look at Bucky and Bucky would see it in his eyes, the way Steve looked at him when Bucky did something really wrong. Just for a second Steve would give him that look like he didn't know Bucky at all, like Bucky was some stranger in the place of his best friend.

Father sighed. "So your confession is to sodomy, prostitution, and lying to Steven?"

"I lied at the drugstore, too," Bucky allowed. "I didn't have a prescription."

"Naturally," Father said dryly. "Is that the sum of the trouble you've made this week? Is anything else weighing on your conscience?"

"I," Bucky said, wracking his brain. Last night seemed like it blotted out everything else. He didn't have room to be guilty about anything but this. "I don't remember, Father. I'm sorry for whatever I forgot."

"James," Father said heavily. "I'm not going to assign you a penance of prayers today."

Bucky made a small, miserable noise, but Father ignored him, speaking right over him.

"Your penance, without which your absolution will not be valid, is to go home at once and tell Steven what you've done. Ask _him_ what you must do to make this right, and do what he asks of you. Will you accept your just penance in this matter?"

"Yes, Father," Bucky murmured, but under the awful anticipation of it he felt weirdly glad. He didn't have to keep the secret from Steve anymore--couldn't if he wanted to, not when telling the truth was his penance. 

"Don't you dare come to Mass in the morning if you haven't completed your penance before then," Father said sternly.

Bucky winced again and nodded. He couldn't step foot in the church if his very presence there was going to be a lie to Father Cooley. Everyone at church would know if he wasn't at Mass in the morning, and he'd have a thousand more questions to answer, a thousand more lies to tell. And _Steve_ would know if he didn't go, and he'd have the truth out of Bucky about that come hell or high water.

"I'll tell him," Bucky promised. "I'll go home and tell, first thing."

"Make your act of contrition, then," Father said, and Bucky rattled off the prayer, already trying to imagine how he was going to explain to Steve. He barely heard his absolution--it wouldn't count, anyway, until he'd done his penance. He crossed himself and slipped out of the confessional, nodding to Mrs. O'Brien, who was next in line. He walked straight to the back of the church, trying not to notice curious eyes following him as he left without kneeling to say his prayers.

He shoved his hands into his pockets once he was out of the church, walking back toward his and Steve's apartment with long, stiff-legged strides.

Steve was--thank God for small favors and Steve for never breaking promises once you pinned him down and made him swear to anything--still in bed when Bucky came in. He had his eyes closed, and his breathing was shallow, not even wheezing that Bucky could hear. Bucky knelt down beside the bed, hands folded on the mattress like a kid getting ready to say his prayers. 

Steve immediately opened the one eye that wasn't mashed into the pillow. He coughed, but lightly, more in his throat than his lungs. "You square with God, Buck?"

Bucky wanted to be able to say yes so bad it hurt. He could, he thought. He could lie right now and lie forever and no one would ever know that he'd covered lies with more lies, cheated on his penance, taken communion while he wasn't in a state of grace. He might go to hell for it but he'd never have to admit what he'd done to Steve. 

Bucky bowed his head. He couldn't. He couldn't lie to a priest in the confessional and he couldn't lie to Steve, not when Steve was asking him instead of just letting it slide. 

"Almost," Bucky said, and he looked up again. 

Steve turned his face out of the pillow, focusing two blue eyes on Bucky. He looked only a little glazed from the codeine. 

"Father told me I had to talk to you," Bucky explained. "That's my penance. I have to confess to you."

"That's rough," Steve said softly. It wasn't even sarcasm. It was just Steve, being understanding even about this. "Having to confess twice."

"Yeah, this is why I do all my sinning with you, so I don't have to tell you about it," Bucky said, a smile boiling up onto his mouth and then slipping away. He looked down at his folded hands again. "I'd rather say a hundred rosaries on my knees at the altar than tell you."

"Hey." Steve's hand came over to rest lightly on top of Bucky's folded ones. "I already know you're sorry, and you already know I'm gonna forgive you. Just tell me and get it over with."

Bucky lowered his head until his forehead rested on the back of Steve's hand.

"I didn't steal it," he said, loud enough for Steve to hear him even though he was talking almost directly into the mattress. "I didn't steal the medicine and I didn't steal the money. I earned it. On my knees, in some alley down by the docks."

Steve's thumb moved, sweeping over the back of Bucky's hand. "One guy?"

"Three." Bucky's shoulders hunched, remembering how he'd thought at first he could get enough from one, and then had to try again and again to add up to what he needed. "Sailors, I think. Nobody I recognized."

Steve's thumb stopped, and his hand pulled away from Bucky's. Bucky didn't have time to bolt before Steve's hand caught his shoulder. "Buck. Look at me."

Bucky lifted his head and let his gaze fall on Steve's ribs, almost visible through his nearly translucent undershirt, rising and falling faster than they should--if Bucky upset him any more he was gonna start coughing again. He jerked his gaze up to meet Steve's eyes, and the lashes were wet, his eyes shiny. Bucky wanted to shrivel up and disappear. 

Steve never cried. Not when he got beaten up, not when girls didn't give him the time of day, not the day his ma died. _Steve didn't cry_. Bucky could count on one hand the times he'd seen Steve come even this close to it, and now Bucky had done it, and he wished he'd had the courage to lie forever and go straight to the fires of hell rather than hurt Steve like this.

"I'm sorry," Steve said.

Bucky shook his head slowly--that didn't make any sense, it was for Bucky to apologize--but Steve's hand tightened down hard on his shoulder.

"I'm sorry you had to do that," Steve said fiercely. "I know why you did and I'm not gonna scold you for it now, but I'm sorry as hell. You shouldn't've had to do that."

Bucky shook his head more sharply this time. "It wasn't like that, it wasn't bad. Nobody roughed me up--"

"It was bad," Steve insisted, so forcefully that Bucky stopped talking just so Steve wouldn't try to shout over him. "It was. Maybe nobody left any marks on you, but it made you ashamed."

 _They didn't_ , Bucky thought, crystal clear. _I was only ashamed of you knowing._

Bucky had to look away at that, and Steve's hand rose from his shoulder to his cheek. "So are you done, now that you told me?"

Bucky shrugged, trying to remember exactly what Father had said when he gave Bucky his penance. It wasn't as simple as tallying up the right number of prayers to say. 

"I have to ask you how to make it right," Bucky said quietly. 

"Well I'm not giving you another penance, the last one nearly killed you," Steve said. "Come here, lie down with me."

Bucky nodded and Steve dropped his hand, letting Bucky stand up. He took off his shoes and tucked them neatly under the foot of the bed, stripped down to his undershirt and shorts and hung up his work clothes up beside Steve's before he lay down on top of the quilt Steve was mostly tucked under. Steve pulled him closer, until they were sharing a pillow and Bucky's only escape from meeting Steve's eyes was to close his own. 

"Come here," Steve repeated.

"I gotta go to Mass in the morning even if you don't," Bucky warned him, but he was starting to feel warm in a way he hadn't since he made up his mind to get Steve his medicine no matter what it took.

"Kissing ain't a sin, we agreed on that a long time ago." Steve's hand was on the back of Bucky's neck, gently urging him forward. "And it's not even a near occasion of sin when you won't kiss me long enough to get me out of breath. Now come here."

"If you start coughing--" Bucky insisted, but then Steve's mouth caught his. Steve's tongue traced Bucky's lower lip, and Bucky shuddered into silence. 

He let Steve kiss him, letting his own mouth be still for once while Steve's lips brushed over his again and again. It felt more like absolution than anything Father had ever said in the confessional. He knew it was wrong--he knew this couldn't last, that sooner or later the grace of God would take them apart from each other so Bucky couldn't drag Steve down to hell by loving him too much to resist--but nothing had ever felt more right than being with Steve like this.

When Steve whispered, "You square with God now?" he didn't even have to think.

"I am now." Bucky stole one more kiss, listening out for the sound of Steve's breathing. "Yeah."


	4. Chapter 4

Thursday found Barnes returning to Monday's church to try again. He was nearly sure he had it now. He knew what he had to confess to in order to be reconciled. He knew what stood between him and being a part of the world again. 

_Anything that feels that good has to be a sin_.

He wasn't sure what sin it was; he couldn't find one in the old mental checklist that really matched. It was a soldier's sin, though, not the sin of the man he'd been before the war. The priest would know. He'd understood about killing. He would understand this.

Barnes crossed himself as he knelt. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I went to confession yesterday, but I didn't confess the right thing."

"Ah," the priest said. "I think you were here the other day?"

"Monday," Barnes agreed. "You told me I could call, but--this is better. This is under the seal of the confessional."

That was important, Barnes knew. That made it safe, as well as necessary, to tell the truth.

"Have you remembered other things?" 

Barnes shook his head. "This isn't something I did before. It's something I did--something I am doing--now." 

He was literally doing it now, as soon as his thoughts jumped to that track, but he wrenched his attention back to his confession. You couldn't confess a thing before you'd even stopped doing it.

"That sounds like a different kind of sin, then," the priest said. He sounded a little relieved.

"It is, I think," Barnes said. "It's a sin to do things just because they feel good, isn't it?"

"Ah," the priest said. "Well. Pleasure itself is a gift from God, but to pursue pleasure selfishly, to the exclusion of other responsibilities or outside the bounds of chastity, that is a sin."

Barnes frowned down at his folded hands. Chastity wasn't the problem. 

"Not that kind of pleasure," Barnes said. "I mean--that, too, twice, but that's not what I was talking about. I keep thinking about the people who made me forget things. I've been thinking about how I'm going to kill them and destroy everything they've built, and it feels good. Thinking about that. It feels so good I think it must be a sin."

The priest didn't say anything for a little while, but Barnes didn't hear him praying or talking to himself, so he hadn't rattled him as badly as last time. 

"When you say it feels good," the priest said finally. "Can you tell me what that feels like? Pleasure? Happiness?"

Barnes searched for the word. "Satisfaction. Like completing a mission or protecting my men. They should be dead instead of other people. They are the enemy. I know who and where they are and I know how to destroy them."

"Satisfaction," the priest repeated. "Are you angry with them?"

Barnes had to think again, trying to figure out what the question even meant. Angry meant shouting or hitting. Anger ran hot. Barnes remembered being angry sometimes--he had been angry for just a second the day of the helicarriers, had shouted _shut up_ , had hit wildly, without calculation--but that moment had passed, and other than that he hadn't been angry in a long, long time. He wasn't now. He was cold now, out here alone. 

"No," he said finally. 

"Do you hate them?" the priest asked.

That word came closer to fitting. Hate could be cold and implacable and need to destroy.

"Maybe," Barnes said. "I know they have to be stopped. They are evil. Hating evil isn't a sin."

"In the abstract, perhaps not," the priest said. "But we are called to hate the sin while loving the sinner. Every individual person you think about killing--they're people like yourself, maybe very much like yourself. They deserve the chance to be forgiven, just the same as you do."

Barnes scowled. "You don't stop in a war and ask every guy on the other side if he's sorry. If he's holding a gun you shoot him before he can shoot your--" 

He frowned. The mental image was very specific, both recent and very old: a form-fitting blue uniform with red and white stripes. Blue eyes and a smile, glimpsed through a sniper scope. His mission, but not his target. His to protect.

"Is this a war?" the priest asked, and the question was ludicrous and unanswerable at the same time. Bucky thought, _Of course we're at war_ , but realized at the same time that he couldn't say who the enemy was--not a country or a government. 

The priest was still talking. "I will grant you there's been a battle recently, but that is over now. No one is wearing a uniform--"

Blue, with red and white stripes. One man was wearing a uniform, and Barnes knew him. _Bucky_ knew him.

"And there is time to ask questions. You are asking questions yourself; you realize that the situation is not as simple as you imagine it being, or you wouldn't have come here to confess. You would be out there killing people instead of enjoying the thought of it. You know that it would be wrong, and that's why you haven't done it yet."

He frowned. That wasn't why. He needed intel. He needed a mission, orders, someone to tell him where to go first. He needed an officer.

But what he said was, "I can't. Cap would stop me."

A long way off he heard the priest say, "Well I should hope so," but he didn't really take it in. He was trying to figure out what that meant. 

_Cap would stop me._

The priest probably thought he meant the thing that had happened a few weeks ago, when Barnes--when the soldier--had failed in his mission because Captain America had stopped him from completing it. Had persuaded him to choose not to complete it. 

Barnes was remembering something else, though: a dense forest far away, snow on the ground and a rifle slung on his back, arguing with the other Commandos. He'd wanted to go alone ahead of the mission, clear out resistance-- _"Cap wouldn't hear of it and you know it,"_ and that was the end of the argument. 

Captain America, his captain-- _Steve_.

Steve would stop him, because Bucky shouldn't try to do this alone. Steve understood about war. Steve understood when it was necessary to stop something evil, and once Steve started giving orders Bucky would have a mission again.

"I have to go," Bucky said, and he crossed himself as he slipped out of the confessional, not listening to whatever the priest was saying. It wouldn't be an absolution, but Bucky didn't need one right now. Not for this.

* * *

**1937**

Steve came out of the confessional looking pale and worried, but not knocked flat like he had last Saturday, or six Saturdays back. He met Bucky's eyes for a second before he slipped into a pew and knelt. Steve didn't smile, but he looked. That was better than the other two times they'd done this.

Bucky stepped into the confessional, dropping to his knees and crossing himself. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been a week since my last confession."

Father said nothing. Bucky winced as the silence stretched. 

"Whatever Steve said," Bucky started, instead of just brazening out a confession. It was somehow worse this time than the first two. Those could've been mistakes. This time Father had to have realized that they weren't going to knock it off.

"You are responsible for your own conscience, James, and your own soul. You must make your own confession."

Bucky nodded, took a deep breath, and went for it. "We made it all the way to yesterday and then we had a couple beers last night. I sucked Steve off and he used his hand on me."

There was another silence. Bucky picked at a scabbed over scratch on his hand. Steve had fussed over the little cut when Bucky got back from the docks on Wednesday, and Bucky had picked his head up and Steve's face had been right there, his lips an inch off of Bucky's. They'd just stared at each other, Steve's hands still cradling his. Bucky had seen Steve think it a second before he made himself say it: "We can't."

But they'd only lasted another two days, which was about as much as they were ever going to get when Bucky was halfway responsible for trying to keep them virtuous.

Father said, "Did you deliberately persuade Steven to drink in order to seduce him?"

Bucky frowned at the screen between him and Father, trying to figure out the best thing to say. He kind of sounded like Steve hadn't mentioned the beers--they weren't really important, Bucky should've kept his mouth shut. He and Steve should've gotten their stories straight this morning. If Bucky said no it was going to sound like Steve had been covering for him and Bucky was throwing Steve to the wolves; if he said yes--

"Yeah," Bucky said, because what was one more round of prayers to say on top of whatever he was about to get? He could take the hit.

Father sighed. "James."

"You said I had to make my own confession," Bucky argued. He'd just gotten caught, but he wasn't going to go down without a fight. "You said I couldn't go off what Steve said!"

"You are under the seal of the confessional," Father said sharply. "That means you tell the truth about yourself, and about Steven."

"I don't care what he said, _he_ sure wasn't trying to get _me_ drunk so he could get his hands on me," Bucky insisted. "If it was anything it was both of us trying to get ourselves drunk so we'd have an excuse, but we didn't even get that far. Couldn't wait that long."

Father was silent again.

"I can't help it," Bucky said. He knew what Father was going to say--he still remembered it from the first time and the second time, all about how this was a perversion and a violation of nature and a crime against each other as much as God. It didn't feel like hurting Steve, and it didn't feel like going against nature. It felt like giving in to the pull of the tide. He didn't think he was ever going to be able to look at Steve and not want to get down on his knees. "I love him. I can't stop loving him."

"James," Father said warningly.

Bucky wasn't going to stand for being told _that_ was a lie. "I do, God strike me dead if I don't. I love him. I'd--I'd make it right if I could. Maybe I ain't any good at it, but I do love him. You can't tell me I don't."

Father sighed, but he didn't call Bucky a liar. "The way to make it right is to pray to God for the strength to do right. Make your act of contrition, James."

Bucky's shoulders sagged with the guilty relief of knowing that he was going to be absolved when he hadn't even really repented. He tried to mean it when he said the _O my God, I am heartily sorry_ , if only so he could swear to Steve that he had.

"A rosary," Father said, when Bucky was done. "For strength, James. I know that you love Steven. But you must learn to love him only in the right ways. Pray for that."

Bucky ducked his head low, shaken for the first time since he'd knelt down. Father absolved him, and Bucky crossed himself and went out into the church to kneel down in the pew beside Steve.

Steve glanced up at him and still didn't smile, but he opened the hand he was using to hold the rosary--his ma's, jet and silver--so Bucky could catch the crucifix. Bucky got started on his penance while Steve carried on with his, the backs of their hands brushing against each other as they cycled through their prayers.


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky stepped into the church on Saturday afternoon and paused just inside the doors, sweeping a look over the few penitents who'd already confessed and were at their prayers. It was the closest he could come to not making a tactical assessment; this church, like all the churches he'd entered in the last week, still registered as _safe_. He only had to confirm that he was in the right place, and that the door of the confessional was propped slightly open, before he went in.

He closed the door as he knelt and crossed himself. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been a while since my last confession."

"Welcome back," the priest said. "Go ahead when you're ready."

For once, Bucky didn't have to hesitate. He knew exactly what he had to confess and why.

"I hurt my friend," Bucky said to his folded hands. "I thought I was doing what I had to do, but I hurt him, and I hurt people he cares about. He would've let me make it right, but I took off and dropped out of touch because I couldn't face him. I thought I had reasons, I had to get my head together, but the fact is that I hurt him and it's the worst thing I've ever done. I'm sorrier for it than anything I've ever done in my life, and I don't ever want to do it again." 

"Been working up to that one for a while?" the priest asked, kindly amused.

Bucky grinned fiercely. "Yeah. You could say that."

"I take it you plan to make amends to your friend?"

"Next thing," Bucky promised. "But this was step one."

"Is there anything else you wish to confess?"

Bucky figured he might as well get a clean slate while he was at it. He'd done pretty well the last few days--no lying, no stealing. A little surveillance, but he didn't think that was a sin, technically. He hadn't done any actual _trespassing_.

"I've jerked off thinking about him six times in the past three days," Bucky concluded.

The priest made a small noise, maybe just a cough, and then said, "I see. Well."

Bucky still wasn't sure why that didn't get anybody's attention anymore, but he wasn't going to argue, even if it felt strange not to have to give the defense resting on his tongue. _I can't help it. I love him._

The priest said, "Would you like to make your act of contrition?"

Bucky nodded and bowed his head, and for once he was aware that he meant absolutely every word he said.

"O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You, and I detest all my sins, because I fear the loss of heaven and dread the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend You, my God--"

Bucky found he was fighting to keep a straight face. Laughter leaked into his voice, not because it was funny, or because he didn't mean it, but because he did. Delight shook through him-- _joy_ , which was an entirely foreign sensation--at the prospect of finally being really reconciled after all this time. He could go home after this. He could go back to Steve.

"--Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen."

It was going to be a hell of a job, amending himself back into Bucky Barnes, but he'd have Steve with him. He would have Steve's help with that, and with everything else. Steve would tell him how to make it right.

"Well, if you can hold still for it," the priest said with a smile audible in his voice, "make your penance a couple of decades of the rosary, dedicated to your intention to be a better friend from now on, and then go and make your amends."

The priest pronounced his absolution, and Bucky crossed himself, stepped out of the confessional, and headed straight to where he belonged: the second pew up, where a blond head was already bowed in prayer. He slid in at Steve's right, crossing himself automatically even as Steve's head was turning to see who it was.

Steve just stared at him for a while, his eyes darting over Bucky's face, down and back up. Bucky let himself look back while they were at it; he hadn't gotten such a close up look in a while. Steve had cut his hair shorter, modern and spiky, and he'd dressed nicely for confession like he'd always insisted on doing even though it was Saturday and not Mass and you _didn't have to_. Bucky felt a little grubby in his sweatshirt and jeans next to Steve's collared shirt and pressed slacks, but at least he was mostly clean, his metal hand was covered, and he'd left all his weapons with his pack.

Bucky caught the motion of Steve's mouth, forming his name. He nodded-- _yes, me_ \--and beckoned with his right hand, reaching across himself, across the small gap between them, to the rosary in Steve's hands. 

Steve looked down, looked up at Bucky again, and his whole body shook with something that probably wasn't a laugh. He flicked the tail of the rosary over his wrist in a practiced motion, offering the crucifix to Bucky to start in on saying the whole thing.

Bucky smirked, shook his head slightly, and closed his thumb and forefinger on the first bead of the second-to-last decade, which put him half a decade ahead of Steve. Steve couldn't have done anything worth getting worked up about in the last week--he'd been in DC the whole time and the peace had remained undisturbed--but he'd managed to get himself a whole rosary as penance anyway. And from _that_ priest, who didn't seem to be any too worried about sins of the flesh. 

Steve snorted and shook his head but edged closer to Bucky, not quite touching but near enough for Bucky to feel the warmth of him at his side. Steve bowed his head again over the rosary and Bucky followed suit, waiting while Steve took a couple of deep breaths. Steve started on his next Hail Mary, just barely breathing the words out loud for Bucky to hear--almost no voice, but Bucky could still hear it shaking with something that definitely wasn't fear. 

Bucky joined in, letting himself be steady enough to keep Steve going as they fell into the familiar old rhythm. Their hands moved together from bead to bead, Steve chasing Bucky down the chain. When Steve got to the end of his decade, Bucky waited through his Glory Be and Our Father--almost calm now--and said the next Hail Mary with him. When it was Bucky's turn to pray alone, Steve waited for him, his fingers very still on the rosary.

Bucky finished his prayers first, and he caught the tail of the rosary and closed his hand around it, letting the crosspiece of the crucifix dig into his palm while he listened to Steve finishing up. When he'd said his last _amen_ Bucky opened his hand, letting Steve tuck his ma's rosary into his shirt pocket, over his heart, and stood up with him.

Steve led him to the central aisle and genuflected, and Bucky followed suit. When he straightened up and turned, Steve was standing right there, staring at him again like he had at that first sight.

Bucky reached out and chucked Steve under the chin, even though his mouth wasn't actually hanging open. Steve's dazed expression broke into a familiar half-glare. He swatted Bucky's hand away and turned to walk out of the church with him. Bucky rubbed his thumb over the side of his finger as they walked, feeling the brief touch of Steve's skin against his. 

Bucky checked all the sightlines as they stepped out the church door--church steps were fair game sometimes--but there was nothing. He glanced over at Steve to find him checking the same vantage points, and he felt like laughing again. He had Steve back. It meant he had somebody to watch over again and no sniper rifle in his hands (right now) to do it with, but Steve had his back, too.

Steve's shoulder knocked gently against his as they walked down the steps, and Bucky looked over to meet Steve's eyes, serious and focused, as Steve said, "You square with God, Buck?"

Bucky wanted to be able to say yes so bad it hurt. It was a startling, specific pain in the center of his chest, stopping him in his tracks there on the lowest step in front of the church. Steve turned back, one step below him now, and looked up, brow creasing with concern.

Bucky said, "Almost."

He saw recognition in Steve's eyes at the same time he realized what he was remembering. He should be on his knees--he could never look at Steve without wanting to get down on his knees--and he wavered a little where he stood. Steve reached out a hand to steady him and Bucky swayed away from the touch, his gaze going past Steve to the row of houses along the street, some of them shaded by trees. There was too much cover, too many possible sniper positions.

"I can't do this and watch your back at the same time," Bucky said. "Can we...."

"Inside?" Steve offered, nodding past him.

Bucky nodded. The church was safe. The church was the right place to make a confession. 

Steve stepped around him, going back up the stairs, and Bucky took one more look at the buildings across the street and then turned and followed Steve back into the church, covering his back. Steve led him to the left across the vestibule, opening the door Bucky recognized as belonging to the room in the base of the church's bell tower. He stopped on the threshold, confused by the absence of heavy ropes; the linoleum only faintly showed the familiar pattern of scuffs in the center of the floor from bell ringers' feet. Bucky looked up, but the ropes weren't even looped out of the way.

"It's mechanized now," Steve said, drawing Bucky's attention like a magnet. He smiled slightly. "Some of 'em don't even have bells, just a loud speaker and a recording."

Bucky stepped the rest of the way inside, pulling the door shut behind him and taking a look around at what was in the room. It had all the familiar detritus: a battered collection basket full of ushers' badges sitting on top of six new-looking cardboard boxes labeled ADVENT MISSALETTES stacked on top of more battered boxes labeled FESTIVAL. There were drifts of church newsletters and familiar-looking brochures scattered across the tops of the boxes, a handful of folding chairs leaning up against one wall behind a single straight-backed wooden chair you could sit a light-headed altar boy or member of a wedding party in, a stray stole folded up on the sill of the narrow window with its cloudy glass. There was a list of the week's altar boys tacked up on the wall; his eye searched automatically for _J. Barnes_ and _S. Rogers_.

"Buck?" Steve said quietly.

Bucky made himself focus on Steve. He'd come here to confess, after all.

"You remember that time Father Cooley sent me home to confess to you?" Bucky asked, watching Steve's face carefully. 

He saw the same recognition he'd glimpsed outside, and couldn't help smiling and adding, "Yeah, it's really me," at the same time Steve was saying, "Yeah, I remember."

Steve stopped there, watching him.

Bucky ducked his head, struggling to keep his feet against the impulse to kneel. "This is worse."

"I have a pretty good idea what you did, this time," Steve offered.

Bucky felt himself smile, a hard twist of his mouth. "Does it count as doing my sinning with you if I--"

The words failed him, his breath catching in something that felt almost like a sob. That pain struck again in the center of his chest; Bucky did drop to his knees then, but Steve followed him down, dropping into a crouch at the same speed, keeping them level. He was holding his hands out, not quite touching. Bucky raised his right hand between them, letting Steve clasp it between his. 

"I hurt you," Bucky said, forcing himself to meet Steve's eyes. "I hurt you, I could have killed you, I almost did, and I'm sorry, it was the worst--" Bucky looked away again, unable to keep his eyes on Steve's, dark and patient and steady. 

Steve's hands stayed warm around his, and Steve didn't say anything for long enough that Bucky had to look. 

"They made you," Steve said, tightening his grip a little.

"It was me," Bucky insisted, because his sins had to be his now, even if he'd had reasons. He was responsible for his own conscience, his own soul. "I'm here now, and I did it and I'm sorry."

Steve nodded slowly. "Then I'm telling you I forgive you."

Bucky let his eyes close and his head bow.

"Are you going to do anything like that again?" Steve asked, and he sounded halfway between a priest catechizing him through a confession and genuinely curious.

Bucky's shoulders jerked on something that could have been a laugh, and he looked up again. "Not if I can fucking help it. I'd rather die, Steve, you gotta know that. I've been testing myself the last few days, keeping an eye on you, but you're not my mission anymore. I don't think I have one. They never bothered to hide my programming from me."

It was Steve's turn to drop his gaze, his hands shifting gently around Bucky's. "We found the bank vault two weeks ago and cleared everything out, including tracking down a few of the technicians who'd escaped and putting them away. The chair, everything they used on you, it's been destroyed. We're trying to find out if they had that kind of equipment anywhere else. They're not going to do that to you or anyone else ever again."

Trust Steve to be on it already. Bucky waved his free hand at his head and said, "I got intel, I think, if you're going after Hydra again."

Steve nodded slowly, maybe realizing the wild unreliability of anything Bucky could offer, from his brains to his sniper skills. "How much danger are you in from them now?"

Bucky shrugged. "Been testing that, too. There were a couple dozen people who knew about me, as far as I can tell, but a lot of people died that day. The ones left probably aren't the ones with the guts or the resources to try to bring me in. There's enough trackers in me that they could find me if they...."

Steve had just said they'd found the bank vault, though. Weeks ago.

Steve's lips turned up a little at the corners, his head tilting in acknowledgment. "We've been keeping an eye on your movements. You didn't seem to be causing any trouble, we never spotted anyone else tailing you, and nobody wanted to drop a SWAT team on you--"

"It'd be awful rough on the SWAT team," Bucky agreed, because he might not mean to hurt anybody anymore, but he also didn't mean to be taken in alive ever again. His instincts were bound to kick in before he could think to ask whether they were the good guys.

"--So we thought we'd wait and see," Steve finished. "And here you are."

"It's really me," Bucky repeated, which was stupid. Steve either believed that or didn't and saying it wasn't going to help.

"I know," Steve said, with the same absolute boneheaded certainty he'd always had about things. Bucky ought to argue with him--nobody could be certain about Bucky right now, Steve least of all--but he couldn't say a word. He needed Steve's certainty too much; he needed to come in from the cold. He needed to be reconciled.

Bucky looked down at his hand between Steve's hands, tightened his own grip a little and felt Steve's answering squeeze. 

"I missed you," Steve whispered, and that sounded like a confession, too. 

Bucky swallowed. He couldn't say it back, not the way Steve meant it. He'd only known to miss Steve for days, and he'd spent all of that time figuring out how to get here and whether he safely could. Not like the years Steve had spent thinking he was--safely, heroically--dead. He'd probably wasted a lot of prayers on Bucky.

"I missed...." Steve's voice shrunk to less than a whisper, just a breath, but Bucky heard the words anyway. 

He looked up, meeting Steve's eyes, and Steve took one hand away from Bucky's. Steve's fingers came to rest against Bucky's cheek, just to one side of his mouth. 

Bucky inhaled, his chest full of something shuddering and hollow and wanting. 

"Come here," Bucky said softly, tugging on Steve's right hand, still curled together with his. Steve tipped down onto his knees, leaning in so only their clasped hands held them apart. Bucky found himself noticing that the angle was different; he and Steve hadn't done this when they were so close to the same height. 

"Come here," he repeated, when Steve tilted his head in and then hesitated, but Bucky didn't wait for Steve to listen to him. He leaned in across the last little distance to press a careful kiss to Steve's mouth.

Steve kissed him back, just a brush of lips and then another. It was enough. Bucky felt warm for the first time in a long time. He felt forgiven.

Steve leaned his forehead against Bucky's, angling away from another kiss to say softly, "I'm sorry for every time I didn't do that."

Bucky huffed out a breath against Steve's mouth. They'd had a lot of missed chances between Bucky's draft letter showing up and the time he shipped out for the 107th. "Army regs, you said. Respect for the uniform, you said."

"I was scared," Steve replied, and Bucky's head actually jerked back so he could see Steve's face. 

Steve had a tiny sad smile on his face. "I was. I was scared you'd die first, and I'd've kept you from having the life you should have, a wife, kids, all the normal--"

Bucky shut him up with a kiss, and Steve let him for a few seconds, then gently pushed him back to say, "I regretted that, when I thought you were dead. But when we got you back, after that--you were hurt. I knew you were hurt. You didn't want anyone coming near you, not even me."

Bucky swallowed, remembering another confession he probably should have been made to repeat to Steve. "I knew they'd done something to me. I knew there was something wrong with me."

Steve's hand tightened on his, and Bucky gave him a sideways look, dredging up a dry smile. "Anyway, you'd gotten to be the kind of gorgeous dames noticed--you were head over heels for Agent Carter by then."

Steve didn't smile back this time. "I was. But you came first. I was right there in the field with you all the time, and I didn't even try. I didn't even ask. I don't know if I could have made anything better--it wouldn't have saved you, I couldn't have--"

"You couldn't," Bucky said flatly, because he really wasn't letting Steve go down that road on his watch.

"But I could have asked," Steve insisted softly. "I could have tried. I could have been closer. I could have let you know you weren't--just because I loved her, that didn't change you and me. And I don't know if you knew that, and I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry I left you alone."

"Well," Bucky said, telegraphing it a little with his smile. "Are you going to do anything like that again?"

Steve snorted and gave him a brief hard kiss. "Not if I can fucking help it, no."

He'd known Steve would take the dare of saying it, but Bucky still had to kiss the words off his lips. He'd said it. That was a promise from Steve, who never broke promises once he'd made them. 

They leaned into each other, their joined hands a knot against Bucky's stomach while he kissed Steve again and again, mouth barely open, just for the press of their mouths together, just to be as close as he could. Bucky was still on his knees, still breathing old incense and candle wax and furniture polish and dusty hymnals on every breath, but that felt right for this. He was reconciled. He was home.

Then Steve's other hand settled lightly on Bucky's right shoulder, thumb just touching the side of his throat, and his whole body went tight with the need to be touched. Steve jerked away, left hand out to one side, right hand falling open in Bucky's grip as he reared back, eyes wide with apology, like he thought he'd just set off God knew what.

"No," Bucky said quickly. "Steve, I just--" he made himself smile instead of tackling Steve to the ground right there--not in the bell room, for God's sake, and not _now_. "It was getting to be a pretty near occasion of sin, that's all."

"And here we are in church on a Saturday afternoon," Steve agreed, with a wry smile of his own.

Bucky shrugged. "Well. The _vestibule_."

Steve's smile widened, maybe recognizing the bargaining tone in Bucky's voice, maybe just remembering all the trouble they'd managed to get into as altar boys and then insist they weren't _really_ in _church_.

"Probably time to head home anyway," Steve said, starting to stand. Bucky came up with him, but he let go of Steve's hand when Steve took a step back. Bucky led the way out of the bell room and then out the church doors, not looking back at the tiny sounds of Steve pulling a phone from his pocket and sending a couple of messages as Bucky trotted down the church steps. 

When Steve drew even with him, tucking his phone back into his pocket, Bucky said, "How often do you have to check in so they'll know I didn't kill you?"

"There's no set schedule," Steve replied, matching Bucky's casual tone. "I have to respond when they check on me. I asked them to give us twenty-four hours before I have to introduce you to anyone else."

Bucky looked over at him, caught the little flush on Steve's cheekbones, the pink tips of his ears, and reminded himself that they'd just gone to confession and morning Mass was still at least fifteen hours away. That'd give them most of the day, afterward....

"Figured we've earned a day of rest," Steve added, his smile widening a little.

Bucky just nodded, shoving his hands into his pockets. Fifteen hours. Fifteen hours to keep his hands to himself. He should probably sleep somewhere else tonight. He used to sleep on the floor on Saturday nights, sometimes not even in the bedroom.

"A lot's changed, you know," Steve said looking studiously ahead of them, not over at Bucky, like he was having the exact same stern talk with himself. "Not just the bells. The church--well, not the Church exactly, but a lot of Catholics, a lot of priests--have gotten more understanding about all kinds of things."

Bucky raised his eyebrows. "Steve, I don't care how relaxed they are, we're going to be in trouble tomorrow morning if we go back to your place tonight and--"

"Not if we sleep in tomorrow morning," Steve interrupted. He was definitely turning pink now, whether from his own audacity or because he was already planning how to spend tomorrow morning _not_ going to Mass.

Bucky had to stop walking, because his entire brain had just gone to static at _Steve_ suggesting they play hooky on a Sunday morning. 

"Jesus Christ," Bucky breathed, because now he was planning it too, and the amount of impure thought happening on this sidewalk had probably just settled the question for them.

Steve's smile turned to an outright smirk, so he probably knew that. He elbowed Bucky lightly. "You're going to have to confess that." 

"Not blasphemy," Bucky argued automatically, giving the familiar defense. "That was a prayer."

Steve raised his eyebrows; Bucky gave him a little one-handed shove and started walking faster toward Steve's apartment. If Steve knew where he'd been for the last two weeks, he knew Bucky knew where they were going. Steve kept pace with him, stretching his legs into the fastest possible walk at his side. By the end of the block they were running, and a few strides after that they were outright racing. 

With every stride Bucky ran faster, realizing that Steve could and would keep up. Steve started to pull ahead when his building was in sight, making for the front doors, but Bucky wasn't going to bother with that. He darted off to the side, making the leap to catch the railing of the lowest balcony.

He heard Steve's laughing shout behind--below--him, and looked down just long enough to see Steve had doubled back and was chasing him up. Bucky grinned and boosted himself up onto the railing. He made the next jump and the next, flipping onto Steve's balcony a moment later. Steve was one jump behind him, crashing against him in the small space of the balcony. There was a little gleam of sweat on Steve's face, and Bucky could see how hard he was breathing.

His oldest instincts kicked in abruptly. Bucky grabbed both of Steve's shoulders--broad and muscular, strong, healthy. Bucky put his ear to Steve's chest anyway, listening to him breathe. 

Steve's hand rested lightly on the back of Bucky's head, and he could feel the small vibrations of Steve doing something with his other hand, but for a moment all Bucky's attention was on the sound of Steve's breathing. It was steady and strong, already slowing. There wasn't even a hint of a whistle, no wheezing, no coughing. Steve was safe.

"Come here," Steve said, giving Bucky a gentle sideways shove. He'd gotten the balcony door open, although Bucky knew very well Steve kept it locked, the same way he knew which balcony was Steve's to begin with. Bucky didn't let go of Steve's shoulders as they stepped across the threshold, through the flimsy obstacle of the vertical blinds. Bucky managed to wait through Steve pulling the door shut after them and locking it before he leaned in for a kiss, and this time it wasn't a kiss that belonged anywhere near a church.

His mouth opened to Steve's like it always had, his tongue slicking across Steve's in the familiar first touch. They'd kissed this kiss so many times, sizing each other up again when they hadn't done this for a while, breaking apart for a quick breath and then going back in harder, hungrier. Knowing every move only made it more urgent, the rhythm of kissing pulling them along. Steve's arms went around him, Steve's body pressed warmly up against his, and Bucky couldn't resist pushing just as close. His cock already filling--as much from the accustomed knowledge of what was coming next as from the actual friction he was getting. 

"Bed," Steve said against his mouth. "You know where that is, too?"

Bucky huffed against Steve's mouth and started maneuvering them toward the bedroom without letting go. Steve took over steering when they got out of sight of the balcony window, like he knew the exact limit of Bucky's surveillance. The trackers weren't that precise, but Bucky could ask him about that later. 

When the backs of his legs met the foot of Steve's bed they stopped and went on kissing a while, breaking apart to catch breath neither of them had lost because that was part of the rhythm of this. They were both too busy holding on for their hands to wander much, but they were managing to rub up against each other just fine, except for all the clothes in the way. 

Steve broke first, his hand going to the hem of Bucky's sweatshirt and tugging it up an inch. 

"I'll do it," Bucky said, leaning back and swatting Steve's hand away. With his legs already up against the bed he was angling back in a way he probably wouldn't have been able to hold before, but Steve didn't back away. 

"Let me help," Steve said, reaching for him again.

It was another dance Bucky knew all the steps to, like kissing, like arguing. It flashed through his mind to wonder if it was another test, if Steve was checking to see that he was really Bucky, but that was the soldier's thought and Bucky rejected it. It was another kind of touch, another way of feeling each other really here and present, going through all the little rituals from before. 

"You know what happens if you try to help," Bucky said, shoving Steve's hand away again. "Take your own clothes off if you wanna be helpful."

Steve gave a put-upon sigh, but he put his hands to work on his own shirt buttons, taking a step back so Bucky could straighten up. 

Bucky turned his back without thinking--it was part of the routine, because looking could be as distracting as another set of hands wandering around. It wasn't until he stripped out of his undershirt and the cool air sent a chill down his spine that he realized what he'd done.

His hands kept moving on autopilot, unbuckling his belt and unfastening his pants, while his eyes sought a shiny surface. He was facing the window, but the light outside was too bright for the glass to reflect the room. His hearing focused on the man behind him, pinpointing his location, tracking his movements....

Steve made the same impatient little catch-breath noises as he ever had while he stripped off his clothes, even while he folded them up with sharp, efficient motions. Bucky smiled a little and closed his eyes deliberately as he bent to loosen his boots and pull them off. He tossed them in the direction of his sweatshirt--away from the bed, out of the way until later, but not bothering to square them up under the foot of the bed like he could hear Steve doing with his own shoes. It was Steve behind him, and this was all part of the routine; Bucky was safe here. He knew that.

He kicked his underwear toward the rest of his clothes and realized that the only scrap left on him was the glove covering his left hand. It looked silly and out of place now, especially with the rest of the arm exposed. Bucky tugged it off with his teeth and threw it after the rest and then stood still, waiting without turning around. 

He heard Steve finish undressing. He thought he could hear the moment when Steve saw him standing with his back turned and understood what he was doing. 

"Bucky," Steve said, not meaning anything in particular, just a noise to make so Bucky would be sure to hear him coming closer before Steve's hand touched his bare hip.

Bucky had to turn his head then, and Steve ducked in for an awkward over-the-shoulder kiss that felt backward and upside down. He realized why as Steve pressed up against him from behind, the breadth of Steve's chest warm against every inch of his back, Steve's cock nestling against his ass instead of nudging his thigh. 

_I thought you were smaller_ , Bucky thought, turning his head to break the kiss, but it was still Steve at his back.

Steve kissed Bucky's jaw and then his throat, on the left side. Bucky twitched a little when Steve's lips touched the crook of his neck, because he knew Steve's cheek had to be all but touching the curve of his metal shoulder.

"Can I?" Steve said, close to Bucky's skin, and Bucky saw Steve's left hand come up, hovering just beside Bucky's shining arm.

Bucky gave a jerky nod and raised his left hand, silently offering it to Steve, and Steve kissed him again on the little bit of flesh left of his shoulder while his hand came down over the red star, his right hand coming to rest on Bucky's other arm at the same time.

"Can you feel it where I'm touching you?" Steve asked, and for a second the sensations seemed the same on both sides, but wrong--like he felt nothing at all, just a cold reporting of contact. But when Steve's fingers squeezed at the angle of his right elbow while his thumb was just sweeping lightly over the metal joint, things snapped into place. Bucky could feel the warm soft touch on his skin as well as the chilly feedback of metal.

"It's not the same," Bucky said. "I can tell you're touching. Anything that's bad enough to damage comes across as pain, otherwise it's just... pressure."

He felt Steve's nod, and he could see just enough of Steve's expression to see that he was focused, taking in intel. 

"Anywhere I shouldn't touch?" Steve's hands shifted lower along his arms, and for a fraction of a second Bucky was back on the helicarrier and Steve--Captain America, his mission--was breaking his right arm, a startlingly intense burst of pain. Steve's weight shifted away from him, taking away the warmth of all that skin against his back and the hot promise of Steve's dick against his ass.

"No," Bucky said, turning even before Steve's backward move was complete. He looped both arms around Steve's neck, keeping him from retreating any further. "Hey, no, anywhere's fine."

Steve looked like he wanted to argue, but Bucky tightened his grip, pressing closer, and Steve nodded, letting him have the last word. He got one hand on Bucky's ass, the other on the small of his back, and kissed him hard, grinding them together with nothing in the way, sending pleasure and anticipation of more shivering through Bucky's body. 

He felt a weird surge of guilt along with the feeling of Steve's body against his, but he pushed it away. Despite the unfamiliar shape of him this was Steve he was about to go to bed with, so Bucky wasn't doing anything wrong--not really wrong, not _bad_ wrong, maybe not even any kind of wrong nowadays. Bucky rocked his hips in tiny moves against Steve's grip, working his dick against Steve's belly and feeling Steve's getting harder, pressing urgently against him. 

"Bed?" Bucky asked on one of those pauses for breath they didn't need. Steve had said it last time, so it was Bucky's turn to remember where they were going. 

Steve nodded, and Bucky threw himself back against Steve's grip. Steve followed him down, letting go of Bucky just enough to catch his own weight and stay poised above him. Bucky landed flat and scooted up the bed until he could recline on one of Steve's fluffy pillows, folding both arms behind his head. It was the most definite way he knew to repeat what he'd said: _you can touch me_. Steve ducked down for another kiss when Bucky was settled, running his fingers through Bucky's hair as their mouths met. 

Steve broke away, kissing Bucky's jaw again and down his throat, on the right side this time. Bucky felt the shift in the mattress when Steve picked his hand up. He tilted his head to look down between their bodies so he didn't miss the sight of Steve's hand closing around his dick for the first time in way too long. 

Bucky couldn't help the noise he made at the firm touch, startled and desperate for more all at once. "Your hands got bigger."

Steve looked up and grinned. "Pretty much everything did, Buck."

Bucky grinned back, pushing up a little into Steve's grip, the friction making his brain fizz. "Gonna show me?"

"Mm," Steve said, and looked down. Bucky's view of Steve's hand on him was eclipsed by the top of Steve's head, but the knowledge that _Steve_ was watching made a shudder run down his spine on top of the pleasure that skittered through his whole body, centered on his dick and Steve's slowly stroking hand. 

"We'll get to that," Steve said, and dropped a kiss on Bucky's chest, shifting lower on the bed. Bucky groaned at the realization of where Steve was going. Never mind Steve's lungs getting bigger, they'd gotten a hell of a lot healthier. Bucky had always insisted on being careful of anything that interrupted Steve's breathing too much--

Steve had kissed his way down to where the hair started at Bucky's crotch when he looked up again. He was still slowly working his hand over Bucky's cock, which was all but jabbing him in the chin as he said, "You don't mind if I give this a try first, do you?"

"Hey, no, suit yourself," Bucky said, breathless but somewhere close to the tolerant tone he used to use when he was humoring Steve. "It's your party."

"You're too kind," Steve replied, and gave a wide white Captain America smile right before he ducked his head and closed his mouth on the head of Bucky's cock. 

Steve didn't back off this time when Bucky went rigid; the wet tight heat of his mouth sank down farther, familiar and not familiar at the same time. Steve's mouth was the same, but he'd never used it like this, like he never had to stop. It took another second for Bucky to even feel it completely--not just _Steve's mouth_ but the hot wave of pleasure from it, starting at his dick but taking in his entire body.

"Steve," Bucky gasped, because it was too much; he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt anything like it. He didn't know if he ever had, because even when he had Steve he'd never been coming home to him from so far away. Everything felt new, better than new, a thousand times better than that half-terrified first time under the blankets in the dark. 

He looked down at Steve's golden head in the sunlight and caught Steve looking up at him, and Bucky couldn't help the jerk of his hips, shoving his dick a little further into Steve's mouth. Steve could take it; he knew Steve could take it. Steve's eyes crinkled up in a smile as he rode it out and then sucked harder, doing something with his tongue that Steve had done to him maybe once or twice before, with a lot of careful backing off before and after, but now it was just an endless overwhelming tide. 

Steve didn't have to stop and Bucky didn't have to be careful. He arched up again, dimly aware that he was clutching the pillow with both hands, his arms still folded behind his head. He should touch Steve, grab him, hold him there, but he let his mouth fall open instead, gasping out, "Don't stop, don't stop, Stevie please--don't--"

Steve, because he was a _bastard_ sometimes, pulled off so that just the tip of Bucky's dick rested on his tongue, his mouth widening slowly into a smile while Bucky made a high wordless noise of protest.

"Sorry, what was that?" Steve said, and he wasn't even out of breath, just smugly happy. "Don't what?"

"Don't take your pretty fucking mouth off my dick," Bucky snapped, and he did reach out then, getting his right hand on Steve's jaw. "You tired already?"

"Pretty sure I can do this longer than you can," Steve said, and he closed his teeth for a second on Bucky's thumb before he went back down.

He was even more relentless this time. Bucky lost the ability to think straight or speak English right about the time Steve's hands closed on his hips, pinning him to the bed so Steve could take him all the way down. It seemed to go on forever after that. Bucky heard himself gasping out broken words that were almost _yes_. He saw the shine on his left hand as he reached down to lay his hand over Steve's as if he could help hold himself down. He realized he should warn Steve he was about to come as the first drowning rush of it went over him, and he watched, dazed, as Steve picked his head up, closed his hand around Bucky, and stroked him through the last of it.

He was still coming when he heard Steve cough, and the little spike of panic he felt was so out of place he started to laugh. Steve looked up, lips and chin shiny-wet with spit and come, and he was smiling enough to light up the room even in this bright afternoon.

"Guess that move still needs some work," he said.

"Not bad for a first effort," Bucky said as his brain came back, because Steve had never tried--Bucky had never _let_ Steve try--before. "Come here."

Steve moved strike-quick, abruptly eye-to-eye with Bucky, his body blanketing Bucky's. Bucky was too sex-dazed to even flinch. He kissed Steve instead, tasting the bitterness of spunk in his mouth while he reached down with his right hand to close it around Steve's dick.

"Everything got bigger, huh," he mumbled into Steve's mouth, and Steve gave a choked-off laugh as Bucky gave him a first friendly little stroke. 

Steve still responded the same--still liked the same rhythm, the same pattern of touches that Bucky's hand knew like he knew how to handle a rifle. 

Bucky let his head fall back once they got into it and Steve's breath started coming fast. He liked watching Steve's face, and that was the same, too, the way his eyelashes fluttered and the little line of concentration he got on his forehead. He made the same tiny cut-off noises on every breath when he was getting close, and the pink flush spread across his face the same way; he'd be fever-hot against Bucky's lips if he kissed him now, but Bucky had a better use for his mouth.

When Steve was exactly at the edge, where almost anything could tip him over, Bucky lifted his head enough to speak against Steve's ear and said, "You gotta fuck me with this next."

Steve let out a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh and he was coming all over Bucky's fingers, wet against his belly, his gasps trailing off into a string of little harsh breaths. Steve leaned his forehead down against Bucky's cheek and let his weight settle onto Bucky, pressing him down into the bed.

"I mean it, though," Bucky muttered, sliding his hand to Steve's hip, patting damply against warm skin. "You should."

"Mm," Steve muttered, his hips wiggling a little against Bucky. "Gimme a minute."

Bucky nodded agreeably and closed his eyes. He didn't sleep, or he didn't think he did; he thought that he knew every second that passed with Steve's body holding him in place, the distant sounds of traffic filtering in from outside, Steve's breathing steady and easy in his ear. He thought he never stopped moving his fingers in a lazy pattern against Steve's hip, but at some point he opened his eyes and Steve had shifted half off him, his hand resting over Bucky's heart.

Bucky turned his head and saw that Steve's eyes were turned down; he was watching his own hand on Bucky's chest, rising and falling with each carefully even breath Bucky took.

"I believe," Steve said softly, just when Bucky was thinking he might be asleep. "In the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting."

Bucky shivered a little, because he was pretty sure that Steve was actually saying he believed in this, in Bucky here with him again after all this time, and he knew full well he didn't deserve that kind of faith.

On the other hand, here he was.

"You're going to have to confess that," Bucky murmured. It wasn't exactly taking the Lord's name in vain, but even in this degenerate age he was pretty sure this wasn't what the Creed was meant for.

Steve looked up and met his eyes, and gave him a crooked smile. "That was a prayer, Buck. A very, very sincere prayer."

"Oh," Bucky said, unable to look away from Steve's gaze. "Well, then. Amen."

* * *

**1925**

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," Bucky recited carefully. "This is my First Confession."

"Welcome," Father Cooley said. He'd only come to St. Mike's last year, but he knew enough to say, "James, isn't it?"

"Yes, Father," Bucky said. "I got four things to confess."

"Well, go ahead then," Father said.

"I punched Eddie Quain in the back of the head," Bucky recited, counting on his fingers. "Which he deserved but it's mean to hit a guy from behind. And I lied to my ma about how my clothes got dirty, and I lied to Steve's ma about how his nose got bloody, and I stole a chocolate bar from Finkelman's for Stevie but Stevie already made me pay for it and say I was sorry to Mr. Finkelman but stealing's still a sin."

"Well," Father Cooley said. "That's quite a list."

"Stevie made me practice it so I wouldn't forget any," Bucky agreed. "I practiced confession with him every day this week."

"Did you," Father said, and Bucky wasn't sure if he was annoyed or not. It was hard to tell when you couldn't see his face. "Does Steven grant absolution, as well?"

Bucky's eyes went wide and he bit his lip, trying to hold in the joke, but he couldn't. He took a breath so he wouldn't laugh too soon and ruin it, and then he said, "No, Father, Steven Grant _Rogers_."

Father didn't say anything the whole time Bucky was holding both hands to his mouth, trying not to laugh out loud. After a long time he said in a voice that made Bucky not want to laugh at all, " _James_."

Bucky hung his head. "Sorry, Father."

"Say your act of contrition, please, James."

Bucky did, and he remembered every single word because Steve had made him practice _that_ a hundred times, too. 

"Go and say ten Hail Marys," Father said. "And three Our Fathers to remind you that confession is a solemn sacrament and no time for joking."

"Yes, Father," Bucky said obediently. 

Father absolved him, and Bucky was grinning as he headed out of the confessional to go and say his penance, knowing that he was _absolved_. 

Steve--who wouldn't turn seven until July and would make his first confession next spring--was waiting for him on the church steps.

"Did you remember everything?" Steve asked, as soon as Bucky came out.

"Yeah, I did, and then Father said--"

Steve frowned. "That's under the seal of the confessional, Bucky. You can't tell."

Bucky huffed, but then thought that Steve probably would be just as annoyed with his joke as Father had been, so maybe it was a good thing it was under the seal of the confessional. He'd done penance for it already anyway.

Bucky bumped Steve with his shoulder. "Anyhow, I got absolved, so you can't tell me how bad it was to do all that stuff anymore. I did my penance, I'm in a state of grace."

"Yeah," Steve said thoughtfully, and then he smiled at Bucky with no edge of scolding for the first time since Bucky had found Eddie Quain picking on him out back of the grocer's last week. "Okay. If you're square with God, then you're square with me."

Steve held out his hand to shake on it, and Bucky took it with a smile. He would have confessed a hundred things for that.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "To The One I've Sinned Against" by Dira Sudis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3565112) by [RunawayMarbles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunawayMarbles/pseuds/RunawayMarbles)




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